Most people know what LinkedIn is all about (it is a social media platform for professionals where you can follow and interact with many organisations and apply for jobs), however, you may not understand how to use it to benefit your job search and career development. I would like to draw to your attention 3 things:
Visible Number of Applicants on an Advert
You go on Job Search section on LinkedIn, filter through your preferred jobs and then you get disappointed when you see hundreds of applications against these roles. Your first reaction is probably not to apply as no way they would look at your application. I strongly suggest that you apply and follow through your application.
Please note that a number of applicants on an advert is usually when people have viewed the advert and then clicked the ‘apply’ button on LinkedIn to read a full advert properly (this may take you to their external website to apply). This doesn’t necessarily mean they have actually applied for the job though which is generally the case unless an organisation has an ‘Apply via LinkedIn’ function set up.
Publishing and Republishing Jobs
You see a role you would like to apply, save it to apply later but then again you notice it gets republished again with a new date on it. In some examples, you see a role you would like to apply and when you click to apply, you notice it says 'this job is no longer available or has expired).
Please note that lots of third party sites republish roles on LinkedIn and organisations have no control over this. They have technology that just scrapes roles from careers sites and reposts them which can be a bit annoying. As LinkedIn jobs doesn’t have a closing date function, recruiters have to manually remove the jobs after the closing date. When third party sites scrape the roles this obviously doesn’t happen so the role will stay there until it expires (I think 28 days).
Make Sure Your Profile is Accurate and Up To Date
Looking at things from a candidate perspective and how to use LinkedIn, you need to make sure your profile is accurate and up to date. When you are searching as a recruiter there’s lots of variables – title, key words, experience, skills, location, companies (past and present), industries (past and present), schools, year of graduation, key words, what type of employment people are open to (full time/part time/permanent/contract etc.). You can then easily see who has marked themselves open to opportunities, you can also filter by ‘if people are likely to respond’ and this is based on their conversation history and if the candidates responds to InMails on a regular basis.
I strongly advise you to respond to InMails messages as this tells LinkedIn and recruiters who use it if you are likely to respond to your messages or not. If you are not active on LinkedIn and do not respond to messages you get, you may not be contacted at all in time as this could be seen by the system as 'a candidate prefers not to be contacted'.
Make yourself 'open to opportunities', this won't be visible to anyone apart from recruiters. Mine is always on, even if I am not looking for new roles, I like getting messages from to time and making contact with recruiters and organisations as you never know!
Career Changes and Consultation Group
I have created a Facebook group - Career Changes and Consultation Group - that you may wish to join. I publish relevant and useful posts there with various templates and similar and you can interact with people from all over the world.
I offer a 30 minute career chat and various one to one sessions to focus on a relevant area you want to understand more about and develop in. You can check it out HERE.
I hope this helps and let me know if you have any questions.
Best wishes
Sanja
